Merrill Lynch and Fidelity and EWC+, OH MY! (We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto)

I have all of my investments (IRAs included) at 2 brokerage houses - ML (6 brokerage accounts) and Fidelity (4 ). I've been using them both for many years and have many thousands of transactions between all the accounts. I've been following the support board for the past couple of weeks and I'm absolutely dreading having to do the cutovers to EWC+ for both brokerages within the space of 10 days or less. I see that Quicken is catching a lot of (probably well deserved) hell for its predictably sloppy roll in what seems to be a pair of ongoing messes, but I'm not sure that ML and Fidelity are getting their fair share.

Below is a copy of a email that I sent to both of my account execs. I would be great if others are writing/calling/texting your execs to ask for their help in turning the heat up their respective IT groups. Don't know if it'll do anything, but it can't hurt. Feel free to use all or any part of this letter if you wish to.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear __________

As you may know, I've been a Quicken user for almost 20 years. I have a huge store of data in it covering that entire period and I use it every day to manage my spending, budgets and investments. The integrity of that data may be seriously at risk and I'm asking for your help to avoid that.

Recently, Fidelity and Quicken announced that they are "partnering" in switching to a new, "more secure" connection method. The reality is that Fidelity is implementing a new connection protocol (this is a good thing) and Quicken has to adjust it's interface to accommodate it. As of today, Fidelity has an "optional" cutover to the new protocol, with a hard deadline of August 20.

So far, the cutover does not seem to be going well. The Quicken community support message board is blowing up with many users reporting multiple problems. I'm sure there's enough blame for Fidelity and Quicken to share, but assigning blame is not my purpose in writing this note. There are roughly 3 weeks before we, the users, are all forced into using a new connection method that, as of now, is clearly not ready for prime time.

As I said, I have almost 20 years of data that's potentially at risk. Data issues include duplicate and missing transactions, incorrect cash and securities balances/quantities, mismatches of securities, mismatched accounts, etc, etc. These problems could take days or weeks to fix, if they can be fixed at all. To try to head off the problems as much as possible, I, and many other Quicken/Fidelity customers are contacting our Account Execs to ask for your help in turning up the heat on those responsible for getting this transition cleaned up and properly working in time for Fidelity's August 20 deadline. I suspect this is not a top concern for Fidelity's IT team but it certainly is for those of us who use Quicken. Anything you can do to help move this up the priority list will be greatly appreciated.

Let me know if you need any further information